Footnotes

Provenance
Property from a private collection, UK.

Khan's Untitled (Mother and Child) is a tender and evocative portrayal of maternal intimacy, rendered in a stylised idiom that draws from folk, abstract, and modernist traditions. With its vibrant palette and puppet-like figures, the work captures a fleeting yet universal moment of connection between a mother and her child, imbuing it with both playfulness and psychological depth.

The mother and child are the central focus of the composition. Their bodies, painted in striking red, are rendered with a minimalism that borders on abstraction. Rather than detailed anatomies, Khan gives us silhouettes and gestures, curves of limbs and swathes of drapery, conveying emotional warmth through shape and colour rather than realism. The child peeks shyly from behind the mother's dupatta, suggesting both dependence and curiosity, while the mother, clad in a lehenga, stands with quiet composure. Her posture and costume hint at traditional domestic life, but the abstraction resists sentimentality, offering instead a more symbolic representation of protection and care.

Set against a flat yellow background, the composition achieves a striking visual balance. The yellow evokes light, warmth, and perhaps the timeless Indian afternoon, a metaphorical space of domestic familiarity. Yet within this minimal backdrop, everyday objects like pots and pans are delicately included, grounding the scene in the tangible world of home and labour. A patterned carpet beneath the mother's feet adds a subtle sense of texture and spatial depth, and possibly suggests both cultural specificity and ritual domesticity.

The use of red skin tones for both mother and child is particularly powerful. Red, in many Indian artistic contexts, is associated with life force, auspiciousness, femininity, and passion. Here, it creates a visual link between the two figures and conveys the emotional heat and bond between them. The contrast with the yellow background heightens the intimacy of their connection, almost as though the space around them recedes in order to emphasize their emotional world.